The CredSperiment is our plan to dogfood SourceCred. Thanks to generous funding from Protocol Labs, we’ll be giving out several thousand dollars to SourceCred contributors based on their cred in the coming months.

As the name suggests, this is an experiment. We want to learn more about how SourceCred works in practice.

How well does cred hold up as an incentive when real money is involved?

What features do we need so that we can represent the different kinds of contributions happening?

I also think of this as a game. We’re creating new kinds of points and new roles for players. How can we make contributing to SourceCred really fun, engaging, and rewarding?

An Overview

The CredSperiment is built around three quantities:

Cred, which represents how much someone has contributed to the project

Mana, which represents how much someone has supported the project

Dollars, which can be used to buy coffee and pay rent

Financial backers, like Protocol Labs, will provide dollars to fund the experiment, and receive mana as a (non-monetary, non-exchangeable) record of their support.

Then, every week, we’ll pay out a certain amount to contributors based on their cred. The contributors can choose to get paid in dollars, or they can ‘re-contribute’ their earnings back to SourceCred, in which case they are acting as supporters as well as contributors, and they receive mana instead.

Closing the loop, supporters will be able to use mana to “boost” contributions, creating new cred. This means that supporters can use their mana to guide attention within the project. Supporters can even earn cred if they are wise with their boosts.

Pre-requisites

We have some work to do before we’re ready to launch the CredSperiment. Among these pre-requisites:

Specify initial procedures for the CredSperiment (e.g. procedure for calculating cred each week, see notes in the system overview)

Finish merging the Discourse plugin

Build identity resolution between Discourse + GitHub plugins

Build initial tooling for tracking cred and mana

Circulate the initial scores and weights for community feedback before committing

Timeline

I initially wanted to launch this by the start of September, but looking at the unsatisfied pre-requisites, it’s not realistic. I’ll aim to launch by end of September instead, which should be quite achievable.